How can you tell if you are a meditation worshipper?
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You have a specific sitting-meditation-method, but you don't know what the textual tradition the method comes from.
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You believe strongly that meditation "helps" you, but you aren't enlightened and never met anybody who is.
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You get angry when people tell you that meditation is just another kind of prayer... but you don't know why you are angry and you don't have a counter argument.
Zen Masters Just Say No to meditation
In contrast, Zen Masters specifically rejected the "sitting-meditation-model" of "do something and get a result".
Zen Masters also specifically rejected many kinds of Buddhism popular back in the day... of 900 CE. Patriarch's Hall text rejects "insight" and "stopping" meditations, which includes:
- introspection' which is part of the traditional Buddhist meditation practice of 'concentration and introspection'
- practice towards a state of tranquility and mental peacefulness
- insight leading to a direct insight in the nature of things (for example that everything is impermanent, full of suffering and without self-nature).
- contemplation on the impurities of all dharmas;
- contemplation on all living beings and the arousal of compassion;
- contemplation on the fact that all dharmas are interdependent (cause and effect);
- insight, discernment of the interaction between senses, sense-objects and consciousness;
- contemplation on the process of breathing (often by counting) in order to calm down the confused mind.
That's a long list of sitting-meditation-defined-by-methods-and/or-results that Zen Masters don't like!
The next time somebody tells you that "meditation is part of Zen", ask them:
What method of sitting meditation do you mean, explained in what text? Because chances are? Zen Masters already rejected it more than a thousand years ago.
Meditation worshippers just haven't gotten around to reading that book yet.
Submitted June 17, 2022 at 06:18AM by ewk https://ift.tt/rZURfi6
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